Collected Essays, by Robert Louis Stevenson

The Lantern-Bearers

I

THESE boys congregated every autumn about a certain easterly fisher-village, where they tasted in a
high degree the glory of existence. The place was created seemingly on purpose for the diversion of young gentlemen. A
street or two of houses, mostly red and many of, them tiled; a number of fine trees clustered about the manse and the
kirkyard, and turning the chief street into a shady alley; many little gardens more than usually bright with flowers;
nets a-drying, and fisher-wives scolding in the backward parts; a smell of fish, a genial smell of seaweed; whiffs of
blowing sand at the street-corners; shops with golf-balls and bottled lollipops; another shop with penny pickwicks
(that remarkable cigar) and the LONDON JOURNAL, dear to me for its startling pictures, and a few novels, dear for their
suggestive names: such, as well as memory serves me, were the ingredients of the town. These, you are to conceive
posted on a spit between two sandy bays, and sparsely flanked with villas enough for the boys to lodge in with their
subsidiary parents, not enough (not yet enough) to cocknify the scene: a haven in the rocks in front: in front of that,
a file of gray islets: to the left, endless links and sand wreaths, a wilderness of hiding-holes, alive with popping
rabbits and soaring gulls: to the right, a range of seaward crags, one rugged brow beyond another; the ruins of a
mighty and ancient fortress on the brink of one; coves between — now charmed into sunshine quiet, now whistling with
wind and clamorous with bursting surges; the dens and sheltered hollows redolent of thyme and southernwood, the air at
the cliff’s edge brisk and clean and pungent of the sea — in front of all, the Bass Rock, tilted seaward like a
doubtful bather, the surf ringing it with white, the solan-geese hanging round its summit like a great and glittering
smoke. This choice piece of seaboard was sacred, besides, to the wrecker; and the Bass, in the eye of fancy, still flew
the colours of King James; and in the ear of fancy the arches of Tantallon still rang with horse-shoe iron, and echoed
to the commands of Bell-the-Cat.

There was nothing to mar your days, if you were a boy summering in that part, but the embarrassment of pleasure. You
might golf if you wanted; but I seem to have been better employed. You might secrete yourself in the Lady’s Walk, a
certain sunless dingle of elders, all mossed over by the damp as green as grass, and dotted here and there by the
stream-side with roofless walls, the cold homes of anchorites. To fit themselves for life, and with a special eye to
acquire the art of smoking, it was even common for the boys to harbour there; and you might have seen a single penny
pickwick, honestly shared in lengths with a blunt knife, bestrew the glen with these apprentices. Again, you might join
our fishing parties, where we sat perched as thick as solan-geese, a covey of little anglers, boy and girl, angling
over each other’s heads, to the to the much entanglement of lines and loss of podleys and consequent shrill
recrimination — shrill as the geese themselves. Indeed, had that been all, you might have done this often; but though
fishing be a fine pastime, the podley is scarce to be regarded as a dainty for the table; and it was a point of honour
that a boy should eat all that he had taken. Or again, you might climb the Law, where the whale’s jawbone stood
landmark in the buzzing wind, and behold the face of many counties, and the smoke and spires of many towns, and the
sails of distant ships. You might bathe, now in the flaws of fine weather, that we pathetically call our summer, now in
a gale of wind, with the sand scourging your bare hide, your clothes thrashing abroad from underneath their guardian
stone, the froth of the great breakers casting you headlong ere it had drowned your knees. Or you might explore the
tidal rocks, above all in the ebb of springs, when the very roots of the hills were for the nonce discovered; following
my leader from one group to another, groping in slippery tangle for the wreck of ships, wading in pools after the
abominable creatures of the sea, and ever with an eye cast backward on the march off the tide and the menaced line of
your retreat. And then you might go Crusoeing, a word that covers all extempore eating in the open air: digging perhaps
a house under the margin of the links, kindling a fire of the sea-ware, and cooking apples there — if they were truly
apples, for I sometimes suppose the merchant must have played us off with some inferior and quite local fruit capable
of resolving, in the neighbourhood of fire, into mere sand and smoke and iodine; or perhaps pushing to Tantallon, you
might lunch on sandwiches and visions in the grassy court, while the wind hummed in the crumbling turrets; or
clambering along the coast, eat geans (the worst, I must suppose, in Christendom) from an adventurous gean tree that
had taken root under a cliff, where it was shaken with an ague of east wind, and silvered after gales with salt, and
grew so foreign among its bleak surroundings that to eat of its produce was an adventure in itself.

There are mingled some dismal memories with so many that were joyous. Of the fisher-wife, for instance, who had cut
her throat at Canty Bay; and of how I ran with the other children to the top of the Quadrant, and beheld a posse of
silent people escorting a cart, and on the cart, bound in a chair, her throat bandaged, and the bandage all bloody —
horror! — the fisher-wife herself, who continued thenceforth to hag-ride my thoughts, and even to-day (as I recall the
scene) darkens daylight. She was lodged in the little old jail in the chief street; but whether or no she died there,
with a wise terror of the worst, I never inquired. She had been tippling; it was but a dingy tragedy; and it seems
strange and hard that, after all these years, the poor crazy sinner should be still pilloried on her cart in the
scrap-book of my memory. Nor shall I readily forget a certain house in the Quadrant where a visitor died, and a dark
old woman continued to dwell alone with the dead body; nor how this old woman conceived a hatred to myself and one of
my cousins, and in the dread hour of the dusk, as we were clambering on the garden-walls, opened a window in that house
of mortality and cursed us in a shrill voice and with a marrowy choice of language. It was a pair of very colourless
urchins that fled down the lane from this remarkable experience! But I recall with a more doubtful sentiment,
compounded out of fear and exultation, the coil of equinoctial tempests; trumpeting squalls, scouring flaws of rain;
the boats with their reefed lugsails scudding for the harbour mouth, where danger lay, for it was hard to make when the
wind had any east in it; the wives clustered with blowing shawls at the pier-head, where (if fate was against them)
they might see boat and husband and sons — their whole wealth and their whole family — engulfed under their eyes; and
(what I saw but once) a troop of neighbours forcing such an unfortunate homeward, and she squalling and battling in
their midst, a figure scarcely human, a tragic Maenad.

These are things that I recall with interest; but what my memory dwells upon the most, I have been all this while
withholding. It was a sport peculiar to the place, and indeed to a week or so of our two months’ holiday there. Maybe
it still flourishes in its native spot; for boys and their pastimes are swayed by periodic forces inscrutable to man;
so that tops and marbles reappear in their due season, regular like the sun and moon; and the harmless art of
knucklebones has seen the fall of the Roman empire and the rise of the United States. It may still flourish in its
native spot, but nowhere else, I am persuaded; for I tried myself to introduce it on Tweedside, and was defeated
lamentably; its charm being quite local, like a country wine that cannot be exported.

The idle manner of it was this:—

Toward the end of September, when school-time was drawing near and the nights were already black, we would begin to
sally from our respective villas, each equipped with a tin bull’s-eye lantern. The thing was so well known that it had
worn a rut in the commerce of Great Britain; and the grocers, about the due time, began to garnish their windows with
our particular brand of luminary. We wore them buckled to the waist upon a cricket belt, and over them, such was the
rigour of the game, a buttoned top-coat. They smelled noisomely of blistered tin; they never burned aright, though they
would always burn our fingers; their use was naught; the pleasure of them merely fanciful; and yet a boy with a
bull’s-eye under his top-coat asked for nothing more. The fishermen used lanterns about their boats, and it was from
them, I suppose, that we had got the hint; but theirs were not bull’s-eyes, nor did we ever play at being fishermen.
The police carried them at their belts, and we had plainly copied them in that; yet we did not pretend to be policemen.
Burglars, indeed, we may have had some haunting thoughts of; and we had certainly an eye to past ages when lanterns
were more common, and to certain story-books in which we had found them to figure very largely. But take it for all in
all, the pleasure of the thing was substantive; and to be a boy with a bull’s-eye under his top-coat was good enough
for us.

When two of these asses met, there would be an anxious “Have you got your lantern?” and a gratified “Yes!” That was
the shibboleth, and very needful too; for, as it was the rule to keep our glory contained, none could recognise a
lantern-bearer, unless (like the polecat) by the smell. Four or five would sometimes climb into the belly of a ten-man
lugger, with nothing but the thwarts above them — for the cabin was usually locked, or choose out some hollow of the
links where the wind might whistle overhead. There the coats would be unbuttoned and the bull’s-eyes discovered; and in
the chequering glimmer, under the huge windy hall of the night, and cheered by a rich steam of toasting tinware, these
fortunate young gentlemen would crouch together in the cold sand of the links or on the scaly bilges of the
fishing-boat, and delight themselves with inappropriate talk. Woe is me that I may not give some specimens — some of
their foresights of life, or deep inquiries into the rudiments of man and nature, these were so fiery and so innocent,
they were so richly silly, so romantically young. But the talk, at any rate, was but a condiment; and these gatherings
themselves only accidents in the career of the lantern-bearer. The essence of this bliss was to walk by yourself in the
black night; the slide shut, the top-coat buttoned; not a ray escaping, whether to conduct your footsteps or to make
your glory public: a mere pillar of darkness in the dark; and all the while, deep down in the privacy of your fool’s
heart, to know you had a bull’s-eye at your belt, and to exult and sing over the knowledge.

II

It is said that a poet has died young in the breast of the most stolid. It may be contended, rather, that this
(somewhat minor) bard in almost every case survives, and is the spice of life to his possessor. Justice is not done to
the versatility and the unplumbed childishness of man’s imagination. His life from without may seem but a rude mound of
mud; there will be some golden chamber at the heart of it, in which he dwells delighted; and for as dark as his pathway
seems to the observer, he will have some kind of a bull’s-eye at his belt.

It would be hard to pick out a career more cheerless than that of Dancer, the miser, as he figures in the “Old
Bailey Reports,” a prey to the most sordid persecutions, the butt of his neighbourhood, betrayed by his hired man, his
house beleaguered by the impish schoolboy, and he himself grinding and fuming and impotently fleeing to the law against
these pin-pricks. You marvel at first that any one should willingly prolong a life so destitute of charm and dignity;
and then you call to memory that had he chosen, had he ceased to be a miser, he could have been freed at once from
these trials, and might have built himself a castle and gone escorted by a squadron. For the love of more recondite
joys, which we cannot estimate, which, it may be, we should envy, the man had willingly forgone both comfort and
consideration. “His mind to him a kingdom was”; and sure enough, digging into that mind, which seems at first a
dust-heap, we unearth some priceless jewels. For Dancer must have had the love of power and the disdain of using it, a
noble character in itself; disdain of many pleasures, a chief part of what is commonly called wisdom; disdain of the
inevitable end, that finest trait of mankind; scorn of men’s opinions, another element of virtue; and at the back of
all, a conscience just like yours and mine, whining like a cur, swindling like a thimble rigger, but still pointing
(there or there-about) to some conventional standard. Here were a cabinet portrait to which Hawthorne perhaps had done
justice; and yet not Hawthorne either, for he was mildly minded, and it lay not in him to create for us that throb of
the miser’s pulse, his fretful energy of gusto, his vast arms of ambition clutching in he knows not what: insatiable,
insane, a god with a muck-rake. Thus, at least, looking in the bosom of the miser, consideration detects the poet in
the full tide of life, with more, indeed, of the poetic fire than usually goes to epics; and tracing that mean man
about his cold hearth, and to and fro in his discomfortable house, spies within him a blazing bonfire of delight. And
so with others, who do not live by bread alone, but by some cherished and perhaps fantastic pleasure; who are meat
salesmen to the external eye, and possibly to themselves are Shakespeares, Napoleons, or Beethovens; who have not one
virtue to rub against another in the field of active life, and yet perhaps, in the life of contemplation, sit with the
saints. We see them on the street, and we can count their buttons; but heaven knows in what they pride themselves!
heaven knows where they have set their treasure!

There is one fable that touches very near the quick of life: the fable of the monk who passed into the woods, heard
a bird break into song, hearkened for a trill or two, and found himself on his return a stranger at his convent gates;
for he had been absent fifty years, and of all his comrades there survived but one to recognise him. It is not only in
the woods that this enchanter carols, though perhaps he is native there. He sings in the most doleful places. The miser
hears him and chuckles, and the days are moments. With no more apparatus than an ill-smelling lantern I have evoked him
on the naked links. All life that is not merely mechanical is spun out of two strands: seeking for that bird and
hearing him. And it is just this that makes life so hard to value, and the delight of each so incommunicable. And just
a knowledge of this, and a remembrance of those fortunate hours in which the bird has sung to us, that fills us with
such wonder when we turn the pages of the realist. There, to be sure, we find a picture of life in so far as it
consists of mud and of old iron, cheap desires and cheap fears, that which we are ashamed to remember and that which we
are careless whether we forget; but of the note of that time-devouring nightingale we hear no news.

The case of these writers of romance is most obscure. They have been boys and youths; they have lingered outside the
window of the beloved, who was then most probably writing to some one else; they have sat before a sheet of paper, and
felt themselves mere continents of congested poetry, not one line of which would flow; they have walked alone in the
woods, they have walked in cities under the countless lamps; they have been to sea, they have hated, they have feared,
they have longed to knife a man, and maybe done it; the wild taste of life has stung their palate. Or, if you deny them
all the rest, one pleasure at least they have tasted to the full — their books are there to prove it — the keen
pleasure of successful literary composition. And yet they fill the globe with volumes, whose cleverness inspires me
with despairing admiration, and whose consistent falsity to all I care to call existence, with despairing wrath. If I
had no better hope than to continue to revolve among the dreary and petty businesses, and to be moved by the paltry
hopes and fears with which they surround and animate their heroes, I declare I would die now. But there has never an
hour of mine gone quite so dully yet; if it were spent waiting at a railway junction, I would have some scattering
thoughts, I could count some grains of memory, compared to which the whole of one of these romances seems but
dross.

These writers would retort (if I take them properly) that this was very true; that it was the same with themselves
and other persons of (what they call) the artistic temperament; that in this we were exceptional, and should apparently
be ashamed of ourselves; but that our works must deal exclusively with (what they call) the average man, who was a
prodigious dull fellow, and quite dead to all but the paltriest considerations. I accept the issue. We can only know
others by ourselves. The artistic temperament (a plague on the expression!) does not make us different from our
fellowmen, or it would make us incapable of writing novels; and the average man (a murrain on the word!) is just like
you and me, or he would not be average. It was Whitman who stamped a kind of Birmingham sacredness upon the latter
phrase; but Whitman knew very well, and showed very nobly, that the average man was full of joys and full of a poetry
of his own. And this harping on life’s dulness and man’s meanness is a loud profession of incompetence; it is one of
two things: the cry of the blind eye, I CANNOT SEE, or the complaint of the dumb tongue, I CANNOT UTTER. To draw a life
without delights is to prove I have not realised it. To picture a man without some sort of poetry — well, it goes near
to prove my case, for it shows an author may have little enough. To see Dancer only as a dirty, old, small-minded,
impotently fuming man, in a dirty house, besieged by Harrow boys, and probably beset by small attorneys, is to show
myself as keen an observer as . . . the Harrow boys. But these young gentlemen (with a more becoming modesty)
were content to pluck Dancer by the coat-tails; they did not suppose they had surprised his secret or could put him
living in a book: and it is there my error would have lain. Or say that in the same romance — I continue to call these
books romances, in the hope of giving pain — say that in the same romance, which now begins really to take shape, I
should leave to speak of Dancer, and follow instead the Harrow boys; and say that I came on some such business as that
of my lantern-bearers on the links; and described the boys as very cold, spat upon by flurries of rain, and drearily
surrounded, all of which they were; and their talk as silly and indecent, which it certainly was. I might upon these
lines, and had I Zola’s genius, turn out, in a page or so, a gem of literary art, render the lantern-light with the
touches of a master, and lay on the indecency with the ungrudging hand of love; and when all was done, what a triumph
would my picture be of shallowness and dulness! how it would have missed the point! how it would have belied the boys!
To the ear of the stenographer, the talk is merely silly and indecent; but ask the boys themselves, and they are
discussing (as it is highly proper they should) the possibilities of existence. To the eye of the observer they are wet
and cold and drearily surrounded; but ask themselves, and they are in the heaven of a recondite pleasure, the ground of
which is an ill-smelling lantern.

III

For, to repeat, the ground of a man’s joy is often hard to hit. It may hinge at times upon a mere accessory, like
the lantern; it may reside, like Dancer’s, in the mysterious inwards of psychology. It may consist with perpetual
failure, and find exercise in the continued chase. It has so little bond with externals (such as the observer scribbles
in his note-book) that it may even touch them not; and the man’s true life, for which he consents to live, lie
altogether in the field of fancy. The clergyman, in his spare hours, may be winning battles, the farmer sailing ships,
the banker reaping triumph in the arts: all leading another life, plying another trade from that they chose; like the
poet’s housebuilder, who, after all, is cased in stone,

“By his fireside, as impotent fancy prompts.

Rebuilds it to his liking.”

In such a case the poetry runs underground. The observer (poor soul, with his documents!) is all abroad. For to look
at the man is but to court deception. We shall see the trunk from which he draws his nourishment; but he himself is
above and abroad in the green dome of foliage, hummed through by winds and nested in by nightingales. And the true
realism were that of the poets, to climb up after him like a squirrel, and catch some glimpse of the heaven for which
he lives.

And, the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a
voice far beyond singing.

For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the sense of any action. That is the explanation,
that the excuse. To one who has not the secret of the lanterns, the scene upon the links is meaningless. And hence the
haunting and truly spectral unreality of realistic books. Hence, when we read the English realists, the incredulous
wonder with which we observe the hero’s constancy under the submerging tide of dulness, and how he bears up with his
jibbing sweetheart, and endures the chatter of idiot girls, and stands by his whole unfeatured wilderness of an
existence, instead of seeking relief in drink or foreign travel. Hence in the French, in that meat-market of
middle-aged sensuality, the disgusted surprise with which we see the hero drift sidelong, and practically quite
untempted, into every description of misconduct and dishonour. In each, we miss the personal poetry, the enchanted
atmosphere, that rainbow work of fancy that clothes what is naked and seems to ennoble what is base; in each, life
falls dead like dough, instead of soaring away like a balloon into the colours of the sunset; each is true, each
inconceivable; for no man lives in the external truth, among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber
of his brain, with the painted windows and the storied walls.

Of this falsity we have had a recent example from a man who knows far better — Tolstoi’s POWERS OF DARKNESS. Here is
a piece full of force and truth, yet quite untrue. For before Mikita was led into so dire a situation he was tempted,
and temptations are beautiful at least in part; and a work which dwells on the ugliness of crime and gives no hint of
any loveliness in the temptation, sins against the modesty of life, and even when a Tolstoi writes it, sinks to
melodrama. The peasants are not understood; they saw their life in fairer colours; even the deaf girl was clothed in
poetry for Mikita, or he had never fallen. And so, once again, even an Old Bailey melodrama, without some brightness of
poetry and lustre of existence, falls into the inconceivable and ranks with fairy tales.

IV

In nobler books we are moved with something like the emotions of life; and this emotion is very variously provoked.
We are so moved when Levine labours in the field, when Andre sinks beyond emotion, when Richard Feverel and Lucy
Desborough meet beside the river, when Antony, “not cowardly, puts off his helmet,” when Kent has infinite pity on the
dying Lear, when, in Dostoieffky’s DESPISED AND REJECTED, the uncomplaining hero drains his cup of suffering and
virtue. These are notes that please the great heart of man. Not only love, and the fields, and the bright face of
danger, but sacrifice and death and unmerited suffering humbly supported, touch in us the vein of the poetic. We love
to think of them, we long to try them, we are humbly hopeful that we may prove heroes also.

We have heard, perhaps, too much of lesser matters. Here is the door, here is the open air. ITUR IN ANTIQUAM
SILVAM.